Strategies for managing academic technology teams in higher education can make or break a campus initiative. The F'ing Management strategy covers the principles of Family First, Friendship, Forgiveness, Fun, Fairness, Facilitation, and Flexibility. The sessions will discuss the application of these principles and why they work in higher education.
After 38 years in higher education, about 20 years leading academic technology initiatives for the largest four-year higher education institution in the US, and 25 years leading MERLOT, I have developed team management principles that I have found very helpful in empowering a team of people in institutions that under-resource, over-commit, and under-compensate the people who design and deploy academic technology innovations. The presentation will review these principles, with discussions after each principle about how it works in real life. The principles are:
- Family First: Our employees are people before they are personnel. Employees at all levels of the organization should choose to put family first for the well-being of all. We work as a team so others can adjust their work to support people’s choices. Enable people to choose when then need to be with their families enables people to choose when they need to be with colleagues.
- Manage through Friendships: Friends help each other, strangers do not. Friendships take time and effort to develop and develop through shared collaborative experiences. Whether people are team members, stakeholders, partners, vendors, or others, building friendships builds trust in communications and willingness to take collective risks. We do our best to create teams to complete assignments and create opportunities for shared collaborative experiences. Trust results from friendships and trust enable us to achieve our goals more successfully and productively. (Steven Covey: You work at the speed of trust).
- Manage with Forgiveness: We all make "wrong decisions"/mistakes. We need to learn from our past decisions and decisions of others AND then forgive and continue to trust your colleagues to make better decisions in the future. Fear of making mistakes/failure does not foster creativity and humanity, forgiveness does.
- Manage Fairly: Fairness is achieved through equality when appropriate and equity when appropriate. Transparency in decisions and actions is critical to achieve fairness. Communicate with colleagues so everyone has an equitable opportunity to understand and support the work. We all must be fair to each other in our working interactions and check to make sure that each person is feeling that they are being fairly. Compensations will be equitable and bonuses will be equal.
- Have Fun: Joy is good for the soul, the heart and the head. Be a source of Joy for your colleagues. If we don't laugh at least once during a meeting, we are doing something wrong (which we then have to forgive and learn to do it right).
- Facilitate: Give a Gift and Not a Burden. Focus on enabling other's successes. Enable other's individual and organizational agendas to be achieved through positive support.
- Be Flexible: Adjust your work schedule and priorities to support projects that fulfill the institution's mission. (Remember to balance this with the Family First principle). You commit to do what you can contribute and you don't commit when you can't do it.
The session will prompt participants to reflect on these principles and suggests ways that they might adopt these principles to improve the functioning of their teams.